Tag: Buzz

June 29 is the big day, Gabe.

Tonight Google finally unveiled the beta of Google Apps for your Domain. Not a very catchy name. Why not call it what it really is? Google Office. I guess once Writely and Google Spreadsheets are added to the suite, the name will be more appropriate.

What was it that people were saying about Google not having a strategy?

Of course, Steve Gillmor has a good deal to say about this.

Let the disruption begin.

On Monday, Skype announced that all SkypeOut calls originating from the US and Canada made to any phone in the US and Canada are free until December 31, 2006. Of course, I had to try it out right away. Wade made a SkypeOut call from Edmonton to my home phone. It sounded great. No noticeable compression or latency.

Out of curiosity, I checked out how much it would cost me to get a phone number and voicemail through Skype. €30 (about $38.50) for a twelve month subscription. This was shocking.

For comparable service (free calls to anywhere in the US and Canada) from Verizon, I pay about $80 per month. $960 per year. $920 more than I need to pay. Incredibly wasteful.

Even if Skype decides to start charging again for SkypeOut calls to the US and Canada, I highly doubt I’d rack up $920 in calls in one year. I would have to spend almost 639 hours (more than 26 days) in outgoing calls.

As far as I can tell, the only downside to switching to Skype is losing the ability to call 911. Is there anything I’m missing here?

Mike Arrington says (via Scripting News) that AllPeers is going to be Firefox’s killer app. It’s a plugin that will allow you to share files with people on a buddy list.

I think it’s an absolutely brilliant idea. I can’t wait to get my hands on it.

Anyone want to make a guess at how long it will be before the copyright cartels attack AllPeers?

Google Base went live tonight. After a few minutes of trying it out, I think I have to admit that this is a brilliant idea.

Flock 0.4.10 is supposed to support WordPress categories. If so, one of my complaints about Flock will no longer be valid.

Just hours before Flock went live, I received an invitation to download the developer preview (version 0.4.8). Being an early adopter, I decided to test it by making it my full-time browser for a few days. (I’m back to using Firefox for now.) Since it’s a developer preview, I’m not going to spend time discussing rough edges and bugs. (Except to mention that 0.4.8 would become unusable in less than an hour due to a horrible memory leak. Version 0.4.9 does not appear to have this problem, as far as I can tell.)

There were two aspects of Flock that I found particularly intriguing. The first is the integration of its bookmarks with del.icio.us. The first thing I did was to start copying my Firefox bookmarks over to Flock. I soon realized that there was a problem: There’s no way to keep bookmarks that I don’t want to share from appearing on del.icio.us. I’d rather not tell the world where I do my banking, what companies I have credit cards with, where we keep important things at work, etc. Also, I found that I really missed the keymarks that I had set up for the bookmarks that I use the most. If two things are changed, I will probably switch to using Flock full-time.

The second feature that I was interested in using was the blogging tool. Overall, I was pleased with how easy it was to set up and use. My only complaint about the editor itself is that there’s no way to switch from WYSIWYG to HTML mode. I do not like the way tags are implemented. Rather than using the categorization system built into WordPress, Flock dumps “Technorati tags” right into the body of the post. I don’t know if this is done because WordPress does this in a non-standard way (if there’s a standard way to do this at all). But it will have to change before I use this part of Flock.

Overall, I think Flock shows a lot of promise. However, before I can make it my primary browser, some things will need to be changed.

And could someone please tell me how Flock plans to make money?

It appears that Google is about to launch a new app (via Slashdot) called Base. Essentially, it will allow people to create publicly-available databases. I’m not sure I understand why people would want to use it. But I do know that it feels at least slightly evil. I do know I’m not the only one who feels this way.

By the way, the title of the Ars Technica article about Google Base is a classic:

Google Base: All your base are, in fact, belong to us

Some of my readers may recognize Tim O’Reilly’s map of things that make up Web 2.0. (I’m going to try very hard to never use that term on this site again.) A site called Bubble 2.0 has responded with the Bubble 2.0 Meme Map (via The Social Software Weblog).

They are, according to TechCrunch. (via Chris Pirillo, via Marusin)